Political rhetoric driving spike in hate crimes, say observers

An increase in highly charged political rhetoric is driving a spike in hate crimes in Canada, but officials aren’t doing a good enough job of tracking incidents, activists say.

“You’ve had one synagogue, one private home and another synagogue today, all vandalized by anti-Semitic vandals,” said longtime human rights activist Bernie Farber on Thursday. “That’s pretty significant. Something is going on.”

An Ottawa woman who runs a Jewish prayer centre woke up Monday night to find a swastika spray-painted on her front door. On Thursday, another incident was reported at the Ottawa synagogue of Congregation Machzikei Hadas, where five swastikas were painted around the place of worship. Last weekend, the Kehillat Beth Israel synagogue in Ottawa was also defaced with similar anti-Semitic vandalism, but the incident wasn’t publicized until Thursday.

On Monday, a video went viral of a white man on a Toronto streetcar accosting a visible minority passenger, shouting, “Welcome to Canada” and yelling, “Go Trump!” after someone called him a racist.

Amira Elghawaby, communications director for the National Council of Muslim Canadians, said she is watching with alarm as the number of incidents goes up.

“We were at 37 this time last year, and now we’re at 53,” he said.

The NCCM saw the number of hate incidents increase when the political rhetoric around niqabs heated up in the 2015 election campaign.

“A lot of them were targeting visibly Muslim women or the vandalizing of election signs for the NDP or the Liberals around Islam and Muslims,” said Elghawaby.

The increase in hate crimes in Canada is a spillover effect from the American presidential election, said Farber.

“We’re living in a new kind of Alice in Wonderland world where a president of the United States has been given the stamp of approval by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The president-elect himself has appointed as the chief advisor and strategist a white nationalist” — Steve Bannon, former head of the far-right Breitbart News outlet — “who used to be in charge of the extreme racist alt-right.”

A recent study released by California State University said that political rhetoric has had a direct effect on an increase in targeted hate crimes in the United States, and that 2015 saw the biggest jump in anti-Muslim violence since Sept. 11.

The report referred to this as the “Bush and Trump effect”. They noticed a weekly rise in hate searches on Google such as, “kill all Muslims” after Trump proposed a ban on Muslim immigration.

The report argues that Trump did more to inspire attacks on Muslim Americans than the terrorist attack in San Bernardino on Dec. 2, 2015. Between Dec. 2 and Dec. 6, eight anti-Muslim hate crimes were reported. On Dec. 7, Trump issued a statement calling for a ban on Muslim immigration and warning darkly about the “threat” posed by “people that only believe in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”

According to the report, 15 more anti-Muslim hate crimes were reported between Dec. 7 and Dec. 11, with those occurring on Dec. 7 taking place immediately after Trump issued his statement.

In Canada, officials don’t do a good enough job of tracking hate crimes, said Elghawaby.

“For reporting hate crimes, the lag in statistics is problematic. It’s better to have updated numbers of what’s happening out there, rather than have anecdotal evidence.”

The NCCM has collected its own data on anti-Muslim hate crimes in Canada since 2013. Farber agreed that updated hate crime data are necessary.

“Unless we’re able to track them properly and get a sense of history and gain some understanding through statistics in these kinds of events, we’re really operating kind of in a blind alley.”

The most recent Statistics Canada hate crime data report was released in 2014, showing numbers for the previous year. In 2013, the Jewish community was overwhelmingly the group most victimized, with 181 police-reported hate crimes — but there was also a 78 per cent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes reported from the year before, with 65 hate crimes targeting Muslim Canadians.

Toronto’s police force is the only one in Canada that publishes a yearly tally of reported hate crimes. Their latest annual report, released in 2015, confirmed the trend in the Statistics Canada numbers from two years previous. The Jewish community was again the group targeted most, but the report also noted a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes, with an especially large spike in November. The report attributed the trend to a backlash inspired by the Paris attacks and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s refugee resettlement program.

Warren Silver, from the Centre for Justice Statistics, attributes the lag in numbers to two factors. First, there is a thorough screening and consultation process with police departments in order to gather accurate pictures of each incident, and to establish after the fact whether each incident was in fact a hate crime.

Silver also said that due to a recent change in department oversight — from Immigration to Heritage Canada — the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics does not have enough long-term funding to put out numbers and analysis out yearly, as it would like to do.

According to Statistics Canada, two thirds of hate crimes go unreported. Elghawaby said Canadian Muslims are often reluctant to report such crimes.